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Rock Band Battle of the Bands: Round 3

The beat goes on for GameSpy's rockers as they try to vault into first place in the ongoing Rock Band competition.

Heading into the third round of the Rock Band Battle of the Bands, GameSpy's house band NinjaPlease! was facing a glass half-full / half-empty situation. On the good side, we'd performed well in our second-round matches, enough to take a pretty solid second-place position. We'd even put up the single highest score on any song, nearly 1.3 million on Ballroom Blitz.

The bad news: we were going to have a hard time figuring out a way to catch 1UP, who, judging from the photos of their matches, had at least three pretty solid players, where we'd been getting along mostly based on strategic Overdrive usage. And of course our own secret weapon, Sluggo, who'd been jumping between Hard drums and Expert guitar, depending on which setup we thought would get us the most points.

Fargo:Let me just jump in to say that 1UP is fielding some sort of legendary team, and I can't help but feel like David taking on some sort of Goliath in face paint. The best players of 1UP's entire organization are all in one band, including (I believe) at least one robot and possibly Sting.

Round 3 would be the same format as the previous week: we'd be given four songs to play in a span of an hour, and all the point totals would be added to previous weeks. After this round, only the top two teams would move to the finals, so the pressure was on.

Fargo:I had never performed under this kind of intense pressure before. I wanted to tear apart the dressing room in true rock star fashion. Of course we don't actually have a dressing room at GameSpy, so I settled for throwing toilet paper around the ladies' bathroom.

On Monday night, we assembled the team for some last-minute warmups before starting the round. Although just about everyone in NinjaPlease! can muddle their way through Hard, high scores are really all about keeping streaks going and getting huge band-wide multipliers, and we found that we could consistently break 1,000,000 points even with people playing on Medium. So feeling good about ourselves, we logged into the special ScoreHero interface to reveal our first song. And it was...

Naturally, we were confused.

After realizing there was a glitch in the interface, panic began to set in. Most of the band couldn't play the next day, so if we couldn't find the songs, we'd either have to round up an all-new band on Tuesday... or forfeit.

Fargo:I'm glad we didn't have to play this one. Test Song 9 from Test Artist 9? Man, those dudes peaked at Test Song 5. You could tell by Test Song 8 that they were just in it for the money.

Thankfully, after some quick messages through IRC and email, we got our four songs, which we completed in the normal hour timeframe. And they turned out to be a very interesting group:

Wanted Dead or Alive

Ultimately, this turned out to be our weakest song. With 15 minutes to upload each score, we'd been taking two tries at each song, and our initial pass with Sluggo on Expert guitar got us 778,000. Taking a minute between attempts, the band debated whether we should try a different arrangement, as it really wasn't a "busy" song with tons of points -- the intro is pretty much drum-free and the guitar is more single notes than real rhythm. We ultimately had Fargo move from Medium bass to Medium drums while Sluggo simultaneously played Expert bass and Hard vocals. It didn't help much, giving only a tiny increase up to 781,000.

Fargo:Putting me on drums is like pulling the goalie in hockey.

In what would become a theme for the week, 1UP won the song handily with a score of 916,000. However, we felt good about taking second place by a wide margin, as GameSpot finished nearly 200k back for third place, and only one other band even broke 500,000.